Screen Doors of Discretion
by Fuwakateema
Summary: The man went to South Carolina and the young woman was on the steps of the dry goods store with hungry, hollowed cheeks, and that is why she is smoking, at night, on the balcony. (CJ/T)


Title: Screen Doors of Discretion (1/1)  
  
Author: Jess (fauquita@hotmail.com)  
  
Category: CJ/Toby, campaign  
  
Summary: The man went to South Carolina and the young woman was on the steps of the dry goods store with hungry, hollowed cheeks, and that is why she is smoking, at night, on the balcony  
  
Rating: R for language and allusion to nookie.  
  
Disclaimer: ABS is da man, and these are his characters. Snoogens.  
  
Thanks: The Sancho to my Don Quixote...or is it the other way around? Much love to Sidalicious the extraordinaire. Also, Dar, Jewel, and Robert Penn Warren rock.  
  
  
  
The air is thick with an almost suffocating humidity that curls the fine hair at her temples, and when she stretches her legs out to rest her feet on the concrete rail of the balcony, sweat runs in rivulets from behind her knees. She takes another long drag of her crushed Marlboro and watches the stars through the smoke. There is nothing more alone, she thinks, than smoking a cigarette in the darkness.   
  
This is why she is out on the balcony smoking a cigarette at night: Forty-two years before, in about 1955, a young, sober, good-looking man with a dark suit two sizes too small and wire-rimmed glasses stepped off a bus in a small South Carolina town, intent on finding his brother. It wasn't much of a town, she was told. Shacks and homeless, hungry dogs lined the single muddy road, and barefoot children with missing teeth ran races to the post office. Besides the shacks, and the children, and the post office, there was a dry goods store and a poorly lit bar with the word 'saloon' misspelled in the sign.  
  
Standing on the steps of the dry goods store was a tall, young woman with a single, thin braid down her cotton-covered back. She was barefoot like the children, and hungry like the dogs, and when she spoke, there was something tragic in her voice. The young, sober, good-looking man was drawn to the haunting, famished hollows beneath her cheek bones and walked with her to the edge of town where dead grass and burned tree stumps served as scenery.  
  
Two weeks later, the man sat with the woman on a northbound bus and never let go of her hand for longer than a minute until they reached Deshler, Ohio. He put her in the brick house his great-grandfather built while he went to the university on the GI Bill and forgot about his missing brother. And when they started having babies, he was already teaching algebra to boys with buzz cuts and girls in training bras.  
  
The man went to South Carolina and the young woman was on the steps of the dry goods store with hungry, hollowed cheeks, and that is why she is smoking, at night, on the balcony.  
  
She doesn't like to think of the other reason, but then he is standing in front of her and she has no choice.  
  
"I thought you quit," he says quietly.  
  
She doesn't know whether he means smoking, or the campaign, or fucking him against walls because she has quit all three at one time or another. But here she is, on the balcony outside of his hotel room, smoking a cigarette she bummed from the Governor, and wondering how much time they have before Leo calls with the latest numbers. She studies his face, bathed equally in shadow and light, and thinks, not enough.   
  
"Hmm," is her ambiguous response because it is too hot even to speak.  
  
She flicks some ashes into a half-empty Diet Coke can and turns her eyes back to the fractured landscape of the city, almost missing the disappointment that flashes across Toby's face. But almost doesn't count, and she is suddenly certain that she will never be able to please him, and to hell with trying, anyway.   
  
"Don't you have your own room you can defile?" he asks gruffly.  
  
She takes another pull of the cigarette and the bright, burning tip punctuates the space between them, like his marriage, like the four years they didn't talk. "You have a better view," she says simply.  
  
"I also have business to attend to."  
  
She snorts then, and slips her feet back into the five-dollar flip-flops Josh bought her in Virginia Beach three months ago. "I'm not bothering you. I'm just sitting here enjoying the-"  
  
"CJ," he sighs, and in it she hears loss, and regret, and just maybe, apology.  
  
"You're waiting for a call from Andi."   
  
It is a statement and not a question, but he nods anyway. The cigarette extinguishes with a quiet hiss in the aluminum can while she gets to her feet. She winces slightly because the backs of her thighs stick to the cheap plastic chair, and there are red marks where she wishes his hands were instead.  
  
"Ok."  
  
She is careful not to touch him when she walks past, careful not to make eye contact, careful not to breathe, just careful, and when he draws the blinds across the window, she is already gone.  
  
  
  
When she opens the door, the first thing she says is, "I'm not in love with you."  
  
The disappointment flashes across his face again and she knows she's not the first woman to tell him so. This burns and embarrasses her because she used to consider herself unique.  
  
"No, I didn't think you were," he replies as he closes the door behind them. They both know he is lying.  
  
"Good, well, I just wanted to reiterate."  
  
"Ok." He sits on the edge of her bed and waits. He waits as if he didn't just come to her room to lose himself in her sighs, in her velvet depths, in her whispered pleas.  
  
"And, also, I want my crystal vase back."  
  
He opens his mouth slightly and the tip of his tongue flits out across his bottom lip. "Uh, what?"  
  
She crosses her arms over her chest and stands in front of him. "The crystal vase, the one with the harps on it, the one from Waterford."  
  
"What the hell-"  
  
"Your wedding gift!" she interrupts impatiently. "I sent you a beautiful crystal vase, with harps on it, and you don't even remember. Which, really, shouldn't surprise me because you think you're above things like that. Nonetheless, I sent you that vase in good faith; the two of you were supposed to spend the rest of your lives together, and I didn't fork out two hundred bucks on Waterford crystal so that you could conduct a civil divorce over the telephone."  
  
He is amused, she can tell, because the corners of his mouth turn up slightly in something suspiciously similar to a smile. He clears his throat, and she thinks it sounds like a rusty engine being turned, and this gives her courage.  
  
"You owe me money for the dress and shoes I bought for the wedding, too."  
  
"CJ."  
  
  
"What?"  
  
"You didn't come to the wedding," he reminds her needlessly.  
  
"I know that," she drawls. "I know I wasn't there physically, but I bought a new outfit, and I painted the town red, and I got gloriously drunk and threw up all over my designer shoes because you decided to marry someone who wasn't me, and I just want to be reimbursed. It's only fair, I think."  
  
He is not smiling anymore and he reaches out to her with his eyes. "I'm sorry."  
  
"No, no, don't do that," she says as she pushes her hair off her forehead with trembling hands. "Don't apologize to me."  
  
"What do you want, then? You want me to tell you that it was a mistake? You want me to tell you that I should've proposed to you instead of Andi?"  
  
"Of course not," she lies.  
  
"Because I won't," he continues as if he hasn't heard her. "If things had been different...God, CJ, if things had been different, we'd be the ones splitting up record collections, and stock, and time-shares. And I don't want that."  
  
"Well I don't either," she says defensively.  
  
"What do you want, then?" he asks again, his voice tinged with steel.  
  
She wants more than he can give her, she knows, and so she sighs. "I want my damned vase back."  
  
"Well, that is slightly out of the realm of possibility."  
  
He is smirking, and CJ is relieved because the tension is gone, and later they will be able to pretend that the conversation never took place. "Why?"  
  
"She threw it at me once and missed. Hit the wall, instead."  
  
"Andrea Wyatt threw a vase at you?" CJ asks incredulously. "What the hell did you do?"  
  
"We were arguing and I corrected her grammar."  
  
She collapses on the bed beside him and laughs from somewhere deep inside. Once she has sobered enough to speak, she says, "Well, at least she got some use out of it."  
  
"CJ," he warns.  
  
She smiles at him, then, and shrugs. The strap of her tank top falls over her shoulder, and she sucks in a sharp breath when he presses his lips to the naked skin there. He pulls back and pats her thigh once, twice, and stills his hand before the third time. When he crosses the room to the door, she thinks that maybe Toby is the point she's destined to miss, and, surprisingly, she's ok with that.  
  
"'Night, CJ."  
  
"Yeah, good night."  
  
  
  
He's addicted to failure, like he is to scotch, like he is to cigars, like he is to the hollow dip at the base of her throat. He's addicted to failure, and she tells him so one night when they're seated across each other in a crowded Detroit bar.   
  
"It looks like we might win, Toby, and what are you going to do with yourself then?"  
  
She's had too many beers, and she knows this because her words slur, and she would never bring up anything as private as failure in front of their friends if she were sober. Sam and Josh exchange a glance and excuse themselves from the table.  
  
"Then again, there's no guarantee he's going to take us with him anyway because, for Christ's sake, he doesn't even remember our names most of the time. I'll go back to California and work for Hollywood scum to pay off this goddamn credit card debt, and you, well, what will you do?"  
  
He glares at her over his heavy glass tumbler and downs the amber liquid in one quick gulp. "Shut up, CJ."  
  
"Well put."  
  
"Where is all this passive-aggressive bullshit coming from all of the sudden?"  
  
"Sorry," she says, but she isn't, not really, and he knows it.  
  
"Yeah."  
  
She traces the rim of the beer bottle with her fingertip and leans forward slightly. "Why did you even come to get me, huh? I mean, I was perfectly content with my six figure salary and swimming pool, and then you barge in with-"  
  
"You actually weren't making six figures when I came to get you since you had, after all, been fired."  
  
She knows now what Andi felt like before she threw the vase at him, and she grits her teeth against the impulse to physically strike him. "You're an asshole, you know that?"  
  
"And you're a coward," he grounds out, cutting her with the sharp end of what he says. "You live in your four bedroom house in the hills, busting your ass so that egomaniacal producers make the top of meaningless lists because you're too scared to devote yourself to what you love. I rescued you, I rescued you from yourself."  
  
"I've never needed rescuing," she responds quietly as she slides to the end of the booth, but he's right and she's wrong, and so she walks away because it is the only thing she can trust herself to do gracefully.  
  
  
  
"Sometimes, I feel like we're competing for each other's pity, which is ridiculous when you think about it, because neither one of us has much lying around to spare," she says on the night they win the primary.  
  
"Maybe," he says noncommittally as he rests his hand on her naked hip.  
  
"You don't think that's a little, oh, I don't know, twisted?"  
  
He sighs in frustration and rolls onto his back. "Let it rest for one night, CJ, please."  
  
"I'm sorry, did you just say the word 'please'?" He smiles at her in the darkness and she places one hand on the side of his face. "Are you scared?"  
  
He doesn't answer her for the longest time, and just when she thinks he won't, he says quietly, "Yes."  
  
"Me, too," she admits. "I never thought we'd get this far."  
  
"We're moving on up, Ouise."  
  
"You did not," she says, "did not, just make a pop culture reference."  
  
"I'm drunk."  
  
"Likely story, but I know better."  
  
"Just don't tell anyone."  
  
She answers him by snuggling against his side even though she knows he doesn't like to cuddle after sex, doesn't like to cuddle ever. But she knows he'll allow it just this once because it is a special occasion. And hours later while he is still sleeping, she will sneak out on the balcony for one last cigarette because she is honest-to-God going to quit this time.  
  
Toby told her she could do this, and she hasn't believed him until right now, shivering inside his wrinkled shirt. But she never asked him exactly why he had so much faith in her, either, and so maybe she has believed him this whole time.  
  
~Fin~ 


End file.
